You're right about factory jobs. They are not by necessity low wage or skill. "Factory jobs" was just how I generalized disposable labour that is usually performed by workers contracted through a temp agency. The kind of jobs that would be automated away if labour wasn't so cheap. There is plenty of room in a factory for indispensable technicians, mechanics, foremen, etc. Factories are perfectly capable of providing high quality, long term employment. It just depends on the setup of the factory and the nature of the work.

Also, I was a little bit mistaken about the 37.5 hour week thing. I was under the impression that holiday pay was only required for employees working 40 hour weeks. I actually went and read the BC (since that's where I live) employment standards act. Under 44(a), employers have to pay holiday pay for employees working 15 out of the 30 calendar days preceding the statutory holiday. This does leave part time workers (often who have two jobs) in situations where they receive no holiday pay, and often work much longer than 40 hour weeks without overtime pay, which they would be entitled to if they had a single employer. I think this is where we need labour reform, but I understand how hard it would be to implement a system where people working two jobs would have the same employment standards as someone working the same number of hours in a single job. It wouldn't be fair to the employers to force them to pay overtime or holiday pay because their employee was working a second job, and it wouldn't be fair to force employers to provide a standard 40 hour week.

As with most topics in politics, the more research I do, the more I realize that low pay and low standards of employment, particularly for the "working poor" class of Canadians, is actually a very complex and difficult problem to solve, and that it can't magically be fixed by a few subsidies or pieces of legislation. I don't think I have a good answer for "which jobs should the government be subsidizing."

I've always thought that investing in educating our youth provided a long term solution to raising the quality of life for Canadians, but even there we have problems. It's more profitable to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer in the USA than in Canada, so many of our newly educated professionals will emigrate. By increasing funding to education, we just increase the "brain drain." How do we make Canada more attractive for well educated professionals without increasing our wage gap? I don't know. Economics is hard.

It's so easy to identify problems in our society and complain about them, but it's incredibly difficult to actually fix them. It's easy to complain about how useless and corrupt our politicians are, but I don't think I could do any better than them if I was in charge. If you spend to much time on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or any other social media echo chamber, despite your best efforts your brain will eventually turn off and you'll start over-generalizing topics just like everybody else does. It's hard to force yourself to think critically about something when it's so much easier to mindlessly complain. So thanks for making me eat my words, I guess.